Raise a glass to Gregg Popovich, the gruff teddy bear who lifted the San Antonio Spurs into the NBA’s elite. After three decades on the Spurs’ sideline, he is stepping back from coaching to become the team’s president of basketball operations. It’s a back-to-the-future move for the 76-year-old: he was the Spurs’ general manager for eight years before he became the team’s coach. (“I’m no longer the coach, I’m El Jefe,” Popovich jokingly declared this week before unveiling a T-shirt with that Spanish title.) Altogether, Pop won five NBA championships from 1999 through 2014, a run that puts him among the greatest coaches in league history. But when it came to being the NBA’s unflinching statesman, he was in a league all by himself.
Popovich wasn’t just the NBA’s backbone. He was, perhaps, the most fearless truth teller in all of sport. Certainly no one was bolder when it came to taking on Donald Trump – whom Popovich has described as a “soulless coward,” a “pathological liar” and a “deranged idiot”. Popovich told beat reporters he was “sick to my stomach” after Trump’s 2016 presidential election win, a tipping point he likened to the fall of Rome. He slammed Steve Bannon’s appointment as chief White House strategist as a fear-mongering exercise. During the Spurs’ 2017 media day, Popovich launched into a 21-minute condemnation of Trump and the Maga movement after the president attacked NFL players and Nascar’s Bubba Wallace for their national anthem protests. “Our country is an embarrassment to the world,” Popovich said. “This is an individual that when people held arms during games, [he thought] that they were doing it to [dis]honor the flag. That’s delusional. But it’s what we have to live with.”
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Whenever the stakes were highest culturally and politically, Popovich was the coach you could most count on not to stick to sports. During the NBA’s celebration of Black History Month in 2018, Popovich held forth on the subject of systemic racism and acknowledged his own white privilege. “If you were born white, you automatically have a monstrous advantage – educationally, economically, culturally, in this society,” he said. “It’s a tough one because people don’t really want to face it.”
Through it all, he maintained a wry sense of humor. When reporters questioned the Spurs’ losing streak in 2019, Popovich used it as an opportunity to indirectly criticize Trump. “Whoever started the rumor that we’re losing these games, it didn’t happen,” he joked. “It’s a witch-hunt. I see treasonous behavior. I see spies. They’re all sick.”
Popovich follows in a rich NBA coaching tradition of speaking out that started when Boston’s Red Auerbach used his considerable power to knock down barriers for Black players. And when Popovich began speaking out against Trump, he didn’t lack support from his peers. Stan Van Gundy, the former Detroit Pistons coach turned broadcaster, called out Trump’s “misleading” anthem protest attacks in a Time Magazine op-ed. Golden State’s Steve Kerr, a key player on two of Pop’s championship teams, echoes Popovich’s outrage on all things Trump and Trump-adjacent. Mike Budenholzer supported a player-led decision to boycott a 2020 playoff game in protest at the police shooting of Jacob Blake while coach of the Milwaukee Bucks, sparking a wave of walkoffs across US sports.
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But where Van Gundy and Budenholzer are respected for their opinions outside the game because of their stature in it, and Kerr – whose father was murdered while serving as president of the American University of Beirut – is blood-bound to rebuke immorality in all its forms, it hits different when Popovich enters the chat because he comes from a background that chimes with many conservatives in America. Popovich played college basketball at the Air Force Academy in the 1960s and was the team’s captain and leading scorer his senior year. After graduating with a degree in Soviet studies and serving his required five years, he considered a career in the CIA before starting his coaching journey as an Air Force assistant in the early 1970s.
When Peter Holt bought the Spurs in 1993, one of his first moves was to bring back Popovich as general manager. (Pop got his NBA start with the Spurs in the late 80s, as the right hand to coaching legend Larry Brown.) Popovich helped realize the NBA’s global ambitions and organized his rosters around Frenchman Tony Parker, Argentina’s Manu Ginobili and Tim Duncan – a competitive swimmer from the US Virgin Islands who retired as the game’s greatest power forward.
Popovich’s coaching style wasn’t always appreciated in its heyday, before the current 3-and-D era took hold. Casual fans dismissed the Spurs’ dogmatically unselfish brilliance, the apogee of Brown’s play-the-right-way ethos, as a bore even as San Antonio piled up the victories – first with Naval Academy hero David Robinson, then Duncan, then perennial All-Star swingman Kawhi Leonard. And while Popovich was hard on his players – not least Duncan (who was frequently made an example of for the greater good) and may have cost himself more rings by losing his patience with Leonard (whose frequent injuries and sporadic availability proved frustrating), the coach’s compassion won out more often than not.
Stories abound of Pop’s personal touch. He…
